Not too long ago, I posted here a prediction that Democratic candidates, sooner or later, would be talking about where they would use military force, instead of focussing only on the issue of leaving Iraq. I drew attention to Pakistan in particular.

Now Senator Obama has stepped into this minefield. To my way of thinking, he's said some rather smart things. I could have told him from my experience in the comment department that for his remarks he would get roasted, and indeed he has -- even by Governor Romney, whose foreign policy credentials are non-existent, and Senator Clinton, who is showing quite a lot of skill in going on the offense, but perhaps not as much commitment to a comprehensive statement of a point of view on major topics.

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Washington Post reporter, Glenn Kessler, has just published a new biography of Condoleeza Rice. According to news reports, there is an anecdote in the book that perhaps best expresses the way the Bush Administration overall feels about workers--and about their own exhalted right to rule.

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The Bush administration has unveiled a four-part plan to rescue its overall Middle East policy, from Saudi Arabia to Iran/Iraq and Israel/Palestine.

Unhappy with Saudi resistance to the Shiite-led government in Iraq, and worried that the Saudis are trying to destabilize it, the President has announced a multi-billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The arms sale is designed to encourage the Saudis not to make trouble in Iraq by aiding radical Sunnis and also to reassure them of US friendship. It sends a message that we are in the Gulf and we’re staying there (regardless of what we do in Iraq).

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The NYT's stirring piece on the rescue of 61 in the school bus suspended over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis mentions way down that 20-year-old Jeremy Hernandez, the hero who had the guts and presence of mind who kicked out the back door of the bus, "had hoped to become an auto mechanic...but dropped out of a training program at Christmastime because he could no longer afford the tuition."

A conservative, I suppose, is someone who thinks one of these two things: (1) that God must have wanted Jeremy Hernandez to come up short on his tuition, so that, come August 1, 2007, he'd be in a position to save all the kids (the omniscient God view); or (2) Jeremy must have been ethically deficient 8 months ago, and therefore have been undeserving of tuition then, but now that he has demonstrated his mettle, a philanthropist should step up and send him back into mechanic training (the compassionate conservative view).

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Apparently, it’s more insidious than I thought. I spent the weekend at the American Constitution Society conference listening to some very intelligent people make very astute observations about the current and future state of American law. A lot of people were eager to make observations about the cutbacks in habeas corpus rights and the recent school integration case. However, I am going to write about something a bit less alluring- procedure. I was struck by a comment Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times, made. She remarked that the last term was exceptional in that the Supreme Court in a series of cases reduced the ability of people to access judicial relief. In these cases, the court undermines the individual’s ability to seek judicial redress for wrongs.

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Having lived through two monumentally wasteful American wars and the souffle-like collapse of several newspapers, I like to think myself tough-minded and knowledgeable in the ways of the world. But it never ceases to amaze me that the progenitors and captains of such calamities always come on as the tough realists and strong leaders - and often bow out that way, too -- while convincing most people that it's the dissenters who are naïve. Call it the anthropology of power: People don't trust nay-sayers who have no capital or troops, and hence no cachet.

Noticing recently that one of my T-shirts was "Made in Vietnam," I wondered if free-market powers would have defeated Hanoi's socialism, for good or ill, without sending 50,000 young Americans and countless more Vietnamese to grisly deaths. At least Robert McNamara, the super-confident Secretary of Defense who computerized all that, admitted later he'd led us into a fog of war. But Henry Kissinger, who deepened that fog and folly, is unrepentant and often celebrated as the bearer of Metternichian wisdom.

Now comes a new parade of apologists and accommodators for Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal. All's well, they tell us, although, of course, we must watch Murdoch skeptically (and impotently) as he makes the paper's journalism his own.

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"Revealed preferences" is a great term from economics. It means pay attention to what actors do, not to what they say. Professor Katherine Porter has put together a fascinating study of bankruptcy and the credit industry in her new paper, "Bankrupt Profits: The Credit Industry's Business Model for Post-Bankruptcy Lending." She uses revealed preferences to inform the debates on bankruptcy abuse. She says, in effect, stop listening to what the credit industry says about the opportunism or moral slackness of people who file for bankruptcy. Instead, look at how the card issuers treat people who are bankrupt.

Creditors talk the talk, but do they walk the walk? Katie's got the numbers.

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The news coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse, like that of the New York City steam pipe explosion a couple of weeks ago, was filled with expressions of relief that the incident seemed to be unrelated to terrorism. But for the families of those killed or injured, the distinction won’t be any consolation. And for the rest of us, it shouldn’t be either. Why should it be any more comforting to know that intentional sabotage was not responsible for the bridge collapse, when chances are that whatever contributing structural deterioration that occurred over its 40 years is no doubt far more pervasive in the transportation systems we all use every day.

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Most revelations about this administration and how it operates are simply infuriating. It came to office with one goal: to do everything it could to redistribute wealth in this country. And, from day one, it effectively worked to take from the middle and lower income groups and give to the super wealthy. Its entire domestic agenda was dedicated to this goal which, I suppose, was better than if it had come to office dedicated to repealing the Emancipation Proclamation. But it settled for doing everything it could to gut policies put in place by almost every President since Teddy Roosevelt to improve the lives of ordinary people.

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The story was in all the papers. The Federal Communications Commission had decided on terms for auctioning new spectrum.

Some stories described it as a win -- for Google perhaps, or for consumers. It was neither.

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Ellen Weiss has just pointed out another little-understood legal device that big businesses are using to squeeze average Americans:  the arbitration clause.  Credit card companies have adopted them wholesale, and, as Ellen's example shows, they are spreading to other consumer contracts.  Why do companies want arbitration clauses?  There are two reasons:  The companies win more disputes when arbitrators decide them, and arbitration clauses insulate companies from class action lawsuits that let consumers ban together to enforce their rights. 

Arbitration sounds like a cheap, fair way to settle disputes.  But just this morning I read an article by attorney Wendell Sherk that started with, "Arbitration is the place where consumer rights go to die." (link isn't working) A study from the Christian Science Monitor backs that claim up.  It shows that arbitrators are beholden to the repeat players (credit card companies) that pay their fees.  The top ten arbitrators (the ones who got used over and over) ruled for the companies 98.4% of the time, while arbitrators who weren't depending on arbitration fees (those who decided 3 or fewer cases a year) ruled for the customers only 62% of the time.

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It looks like the Saudis will be attending the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference next September.

This is pretty amazing. Until now the operating assumption has been that only the Egyptians and Jordanians would participate which represents "same old, same old" in Middle East terms.

But the Saudis may finally be getting serious about their peace initiative, so serious that they may actually be ready to discuss it with the Israelis. It's about time.

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On July 22, under the headline "Raider without a cause," I published a piece in the LAT on who else, Ralph Nader. I argued there that Nader, who told the Greens a couple of weeks ago that he is "considering" yet another run at the presidency, is more irrelevant than usual in the '08 campaign because the movement spirit that animates outsider politics has gravitated into the Democratic Party in the form of the netroots and all manner of electoral activism--also a theme of my forthcoming book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent.

Nader may be piping a stale tune but I'm struck, yet again, not only by his (and his fans') obduracy and shiftiness but the sheer venom that pours forth from their quarters. A few letters I got, and posts I saw from out in the wild left yonder, were as insanely rageful, vicious, indifferent to evidence and logic as any I've ever seen from the winger battalions.

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Many readers rightly pointed out that I was overly broad to ascribe a certain Clintonian political defensiveness to all liberal "boomers." Rick Perlstein, being interviewed by Chris Hayes, makes a point that focuses this issue: the defensiveness is generational, and more specifically it's a reaction to a specific experience some had within that generation:

The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats--and I'm 35--have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats.

Officials in counties surrounding D.C. are sending notices to their residents right now, warning them of a change in Comcast Cable’s legal policy. Comcast has decided to impose mandatory arbitration, essentially, on its customers in the Washington, D.C. area. If you don’t know what that is or what it means, you aren’t alone. But I can almost promise you that you, too, have “agreed” to this term in a contract at least a handful of times. Comcast says the decision is not that important and that arbitration is a fast, low-cost way to resolve legal disputes. But for whom?

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The Sunshine boys, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, are out today with patent nonsense that the mainstream media will lap up–We Are Winning in Iraq.

According to O’Hanlon and Pollack in today’s New York Times:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Yes sirree. That O’Hanlon is one tough analyst and critic. Here’s what he told the Voice of America in March 2005:

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I don't recall anyone at the Cafe posting on the news flurry that surrounded Hillary Clinton's cleavage revealing suit. Perhaps it was because the whole subject is so infuriating that few of us want to deal with it.

But I think we have to.

There is a 50-50 chance that our nominee is going to be Hillary Clinton.

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Beware "bipartisanship in foreign policy." It's a euphemism for maintenance of that rapacious, blood-soaked, amoral institution we can call the U.S. National Security State (USNSS). The Washington Post is its propaganda arm. TPM Cafe regular Anne-Marie Slaughter is one of its ambassadors to the Democratic electorate. The project they are dedicated to promoting is endless war with Muslims We Don't Like (MWDL), presently and indefinitely in Iraq, imminently in Iran.

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This is extremely important:

One difference between Obama and Clinton does not seem to me to have been stressed enough. They are of different Democratic generations. Clinton is from the traumatized generation; Obama isn't. Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation.

I hear echoes of this constantly from boomer liberals (and younger liberals too heavily influenced by boomer mentors). "You can't say that, imagine the ad they'd cut!" "Remember what happened to McGovern/Dukakis/Mondale when he said that?!"

It really drives me insane.

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Yes folks, the 1970s television show where contestants would perform amazing and often dangerous stunts is back. In its new form, members of Congress say unbelievably ridiculous things in support of the special tax break received by managers of hedge funds and private equity funds.

Just to remind people, this tax break allows fund managers to pay a tax rate of just 15 percent on their earnings, as opposed to the 25 percent rate paid by teachers and firefighters or the 35 percent rate paid by higher paid doctors and lawyers. Fund managers, many of whom earn more than $100 million a year, need this special tax break in order to cope with the soaring cost of vacation homes, yachts, private jets and other necessities for people in their income class.

The story being pitched by the members of Congress who support the tax break is that it would hurt public pension funds if fund managers had to pay the same tax rates as ordinary workers. They argue that higher taxes would be passed in on higher fees, which would lower pension fund returns. Incredible story, let’s do the numbers.

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In Jonathan Glatter's Sunday New York Times piece about colleges increasing the costs of for certain majors, the Dean of the College of Engineering at Iowa State makes a central point:

Mr. Kushner said he thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power. "There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low,” he said. “That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That’s no longer the perception.”

Yes, but let's go all the way:

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Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) plans to up the ante on the Alberto Gonzales controversy, introducing legislation to begin impeachment proceedings against the embattled Attorney General. The resolution, which will be submitted to Congress tomorrow, reads as follows:

Resolved: That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Alberto Gonzales for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Vice President Cheney echoed the President's expression of confidence in Gonzales today, calling himself a "big fan" in a radio interview with CBS.